Babri: 20 years on

Twenty years ago this day, the Babri Masjid was brought down. Riots broke out around the country. Mumbai was severely affected. Muslims attacked Hindus in retaliation for the demolition. Weeks later, in January 1993, Shiv Sena mobs targeted Muslims across the city in the most concentrated acts of communal violence seen in Mumbai.

Two months later, on March 12, 1993, the “Muslim” underworld of Dawood Ibrahim took revenge yet again – not on Hindus alone but all Mumbaikars. Serial blasts ripped through the city – from the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in South Mumbai to the Sea Rock Hotel in the suburbs.

The Srikrishna Commission, set up to inquire into the riots, had this to say about those four fateful months between December 1992 and March 1993:

One common link between the riots of December 1992 and January 1993 and the bomb blasts of March 12, 1993 appears to be that the former (riots) appears to have been a causative factor for the latter. There does appear to be a cause and effect relationship between the two riots and the serial bomb blasts.

Another common link is that some of the accused who were involved in substantive riot-related offense were also accused in the serial bomb blasts case, though their number is only three or four.

Tiger Memon, the key figure in the serial bomb blasts case and his family had suffered extensively during the riots and therefore can be said to have had deep rooted motive for revenge. It would appear that one of his trusted accomplices, Javed Dawood Tailor, alias Javed Chikna, had also suffered a bullet injury during the riots and therefore he also had a motive for revenge.

Twenty years later, the country has moved on. Young Muslims want to put the past behind them. But will politicians let them?

In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party (SP) brazenly panders to Muslims’ sense of grievance. Instead of educating its 38 million Muslims (19% of UP’s population), it appeases them with promises of quotas in jobs and education.

Poor and jobless Muslims take the bait. Most want modern education but get madrassas. It suits Mulayam Singh Yadav and Akhilesh Yadav to keep their Muslim voters under-educated, deprived and poor lest they begin to ask uncomfortable questions.

Consider three:

Question 1: Why does Uttar Pradesh, despite the Samajwadi Party having been in office between 2002 and 2007 and for 9 months since March 2012, have among the worst human development indices in the country?

Question 3: Why does Uttar Pradesh become the communal riot capital of India whenever the Samajwadi Party forms the government?

Neither Mulayam nor Akhilesh will provide answers to these questions because they have none. To them governance means power. Power means money. And their politics stops there.

The Muslims of Uttar Pradesh, like those in many states across India, are pawns in this damaging exhibition of political populism. They vote for the Samajwadi Party but get little in return – a regressive education, poorly paid jobs and an inflated sense of communal grievance.

The Congress practises a more sophisticated form of quasi-communalism. It ducks and weaves its way through Uttar Pradesh’s complex politics to ensure that the Samajwadi Party supports it in the Lok Sabha when needed. It uses union ministers to dangle carrots, including quotas for Muslims, in front of the glazed eyes of Uttar Pradesh’s Muslims and the knowing eyes of Mulayam and Akhilesh.

The poor Muslims of Uttar Pradesh, numbering nearly twice the population of Australia, live in suspended hope of a better life while their kin die in politically motivated communal riots across the state.

To add to the cruel irony, the SP and its solicitous senior partner-in-mufti, the Congress, say they are both secular. Their mission is to fight “communal forces” and keep them out of power at any cost.

Liberal Muslims have of course seen through this tawdry game. But, as the Rajinder Sachar and Ranganath Mishra Commission reports show, their number is small. Muslims have been deliberately kept backward and communalised – abetted by corrupt and regressive clerics and mullahs – to feed their sense of “identity” grievance so that they vote unquestioningly for the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh and the Congress at the centre to keep “communal forces” at bay.

Coming from communal forces themselves, masquerading as secularists, this is the cruelest fraud being played out on the Muslims of India.

Real secularism simply means this: no discrimination and no favouritism on the grounds of religion. The Samajwadi Party and the Congress practise the exact opposite. The BJP, with its reactionary Hindutva, doesn’t help its own cause. It must instead practise Vajpayee’s Bharatiyeta, which says India belongs to all communities and all communities belong to India.

You are Indian first – Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Parsi or Jew second. That is real secularism. Not the fraudulent version being marketed in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere.

Muslims especially need to recognize this or they will remain caught in the trap of poverty and backwardness that politicians who pretend to be their protectors, but are not, have set for them.

Author

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
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Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .